Feminine influence in foreign lands

Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat by Helen McCarthy (Bloomsbury, £25)

Diplomacy was an all-male profession as recently as 1946, and didn’t give up its exclusivity without a struggle. Traditionally it was a job for wealthy and privileged upper-class types: women were thought to be insufficiently impartial, rational or trustworthy to represent their country abroad — and anyway the chaps didn’t want them there. As one officer said, “the introduction of a girl into [The Hague], unless she was quite exceptional, would be a very disturbing factor and quite possibly impair the efficiency of the machine”.

Not that women were absent from embassy life. As historian Helen McCarthy relates, they were “everywhere and nowhere” in the form of diplomatic wives and unpaid or temporary affiliates.

The writer and traveller Gertrude Bell provided the Foreign Office with essential intelligence when its Arab bureau was set up in 1915 and was part of the secretariat that decided on the future of Iraq after the Great War. Twenty years later, Freya Stark was doing similar work in Egypt and Yemen, and McCarthy charts a host of lesser-known figures, hard-working, super-adaptable, cheerfully disposed women attending conferences, gathering information, sitting on committees in British outposts around the world.

A commission set up in the Thirties decided against admitting females to the Diplomatic Service on the grounds that it would be too difficult for other cultures to deal with. They had a point: Nancy Lambton, a Persianist working as press attaché to the British legation in Tehran in 1939, caused consternation when she was presented to the Shah wearing academic robes and cap, the nearest alternative she could think of to the men’s dress clothes: “Majesty pointed and said, ‘Who’s this, who is this?’,” refused to speak to her and seemed “rather shaken by the whole affair”.

Another consideration was the “insuperable difficulties” of female diplomats having husbands and families, also their physical frailty and the seedier challenges of consular life. What would you do with the drunken sailor? the commissioners wanted to know, to which one witness replied tartly, “women have a rather special technique for managing drunken men, which they have acquired by long years of experience at home”.

Women made it through in 1945, in a reorganisation of the whole Foreign Service. They were always in junior posts and had less extensive training, and were by definition not boat-rocking types. Some found there were advantages to be had from being in a minority. Mary Moore, later an Oxbridge college head, recalled how her male fellow delegates at the UN “visibly cheered up” on her arrival. “Men being men, they’d much rather have a fairly personable female coming in to call on them than just any old little Third Secretary male.”

Helen McCarthy has conducted a lot of valuable interviews for her book and researched assiduously, but something feels missing. It’s not just that one can only be so interested in the gender imbalance at UN meetings and the blips in the career of Dame Pauline Neville-Jones. McCarthy wants to encourage mild outrage about the way women were treated in this profession 100 years ago but what else would we ever have supposed?

And it’s odd to moralise about the Bad Old Days of inequality as if that had all been cured by today’s mentoring schemes, talent- management programmes and quotas, when it hasn’t.